Daft Wee Stories (4 page)

Then things go from bad to worse. Your son realises he needs to get a bit higher to throw the ball over, so he climbs up on the wee wall you've got running along the side of the garden. It's not a very high wall, it only comes up to your knee, but he could hurt himself. And he does. His foot slips away as he tries to lift himself up and his knee bangs against the edge. He starts to cry. He's not screaming, more like whimpering to himself, and looking over to you to make it all right. This is his fault, man, that guy, putting his hands over the fence, encouraging your son, it makes your fucking blood boil. You want to get up, but you can't, you're in too deep. They'll wonder how you can hear him crying all quietly at the other end of the garden yet you couldn't hear him shouting in your ear. They'll know you were pretending to be asleep and you'll look childish.

And now they're asking your son if he's all right. Mum, dad and daughter, all up at the fence, tending to your son with kind words, the people who stole his ball, making sure he feels loved and cared for while you do nothing, pretending to be asleep. Look what they've reduced you to. Just look at it. You are going to make these people pay. You have to. But for now, just lie there. Wait.

So you lie and wait, pretending to be dead to the world until they go back inside. Around two hours it takes. Two fucking hours. You stand up; your son tells you about his grazed knee and the ball in your garden. You ask about the grazed knee, but pretend to not hear the bit about the ball, in case they're up there listening. You go inside, make him some dinner, then put him to bed. You read him a book, but you don't put on your usual funny voices, you're not in the mood. Then you leave. And you wait until nightfall.

You wait until it's dark enough to go into your back garden without being seen by prying eyes, when you can get your hands on that ball. Their ball. And you won't be chucking it back over their fence, don't think that for a second. No, that ball is fucking getting it.

Go. Now. Pick up something sharp and go.

You pick up a pair of scissors lying on the kitchen worktop and you open the back door, and you walk up to the ball in your garden. Their fucking ball. Their stupid ball. And you stab it. You stab it three, four, five times.

More!

Six, seven, eight times.

Again!

Nine times. Until there's nothing left to stab, until you're poking at ribbons. Fucking hell, that felt good, didn't it?

Hold on, did you hear something there? Did you hear somebody in the neighbours' garden?

No. I don't think so.

You take the ball, or what's left of it, and walk towards the back gate; you're going to stick this fucking thing in the bin. You open the gate, find your bin and open the lid. But stop. Stop!

Don't put it in your bin. Put it in their bin. When they look through the garden fence tomorrow and see their ball's away, the first place they'll look is your bin. That's the way their minds work, takes one to know one and all that. So put the ball in theirs. Lift some of their bags up, stick it down deep, and put the bags back on top. If they want their ball back, there it fucking is, mate, there it fucking is.

You turn around to find their bin.

And there's your neighbour.

He saw the lot. I think he saw the lot. I told you I heard something.

He asks you what the bloody hell you think you are doing. You try denying it, despite having a pair of scissors and a shredded ball in your hands. But I say it's too late to go on the back foot. Go on the offensive, that's what I say.

So you tell him he fucking started it by putting your son's ball in the bin. Too fucking right he did. Then it's your neighbour's turn to start denying it, saying he chucked the ball back over, he told you. Oh, he ‘told you'. Know what to tell him? Tell him to fucking shut up.

You tell him, then he says he's going to phone the police and show them what you did to his daughter's ball. Aye, but first he'll need to get the ball, won't he? But you're not going to let that happen, are you? You try to disappear back into your garden with the evidence, but your neighbour follows you in and grabs at the ball. You push him away, because he shouldn't be in your garden, that's private property, that's trespass. Remember what you're allowed to do in America.

You stab him.

Not much, just a wee bit to get him to fuck off, no more than a scratch on his waist. But it's enough to make him think his life is in danger, and now he has to make a decision. Fight or flight? Fight or flight?

It's fight.

He goes for you, and what happens next is a mess. A bit of a mess. Hard to know who did what, it happened so quickly. Then it somehow came to an end.

And now you're lying out of breath in your garden with a gash on your cheek. As for your neighbour, you can see him through the gaps in the fence, crawling through his back garden to the safety of his house. Crawling like he's doing the sidestroke, with a pair of scissors in his chest.

It's not looking good.

You turn away and wonder. You wonder how this happened. You wonder how many years you'll get. And as you turn, you can see behind your garden shed. The space between the shed and the fence. Just a wee space. You didn't bother looking before. You didn't think anything would fit there. But there it is.

Your son's ball.

Oh dear.

Oh dear, look what you've done.

However did it come to this?

And now you're looking at me.

And I can see by the way you're looking at me that you think I should have known. I should have known the ball was there. Well, I didn't know. I'll admit, I thought I saw something when you were first looking, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't bother saying.

Anyway, that doesn't matter; the bottom line is that you did this. Aye, I might have pushed you a bit, but it was you that did it. If I asked you to jump in the Clyde, would you do it?

Right, I can see you're still looking at me that way, I'm sorry to see that. Sorry that you feel I was to blame. But I better go now.

It's my dinner.

My dinner's in the oven.

I don't want it getting burnt.

Hate begets hate.

Violence begets violence.

Chicken nuggets chicken.

The father of the bride stood up and tapped his champagne glass with a knife. Ding ding ding ding, smash.

He smashed the glass.

If it were you or I up there smashing that glass, the place would have erupted into laughter. Good-natured laughter. What a classic moment that would have been. But not this time. Nobody laughed. It wasn't because the father of the bride was a deeply serious man in particular. It wasn't because he had some kind of condition that led to him having accidents and nobody wanted to laugh at a guy that had something wrong with him, it wasn't that. The reason why nobody laughed was because the guy was an arsehole. How do I define an arsehole? Well, one example is that earlier that day he'd said something racist. And that's just one example. An arsehole.

He went to put the broken glass back down on the table, but it slipped out of his hand. He instinctively reached out to grab it, not thinking of the consequences of shooting your hand out towards a broken glass. He cut his hand open. A big gash down his palm and a few shards between his fingers. It was bad.

If it were you or I getting our hand slashed open like that, you'd have all these people running over to you, trying to help. You'd have somebody shouting for a bandage or maybe even an ambulance. You'd at least have a crowd around, offering their sympathy, asking if you're all right. But not this time. Nobody helped, because he was an arsehole. Earlier he'd patted the backside of one of the waitresses, in full view of the reception. There's another example for you. An arsehole.

He had to get a taxi to the hospital. Nobody would drive him, everybody said they'd had a drink, even the ones that were teetotal. It took half an hour before the taxi even showed, during which time he'd tried pulling out some of the shards of glass, cutting his hand open even more. When he finally got to the hospital and showed his hand to the triage nurse, it was much worse than when he first had the accident. Not a pretty sight.

Now, if it were you or I going to the hospital with our hand in that state, we'd get seen to right away, or if there were people with more serious injuries, they'd see to us as soon as they could. But not this time. They just kept telling him he'd be seen to any moment, which was a lie. He watched people come in after him with less urgent ailments, people who twisted their ankles or banged their heads, nothing where they were losing blood or needed to be stitched up quick – and yet they were being treated first. Any time he complained, he was told to just calm down and that he'd be seen to any moment. They kept telling him that for four hours until he decided to just leave. And good riddance to him. You see, he'd been in the month before. He'd started an argument in the waiting room about foreigners coming over here to use the NHS, plus he made a remark to a couple of nurses about how they were all wearing trousers these days and he'd like to see them back in skirts to give the men something to look at while they waited.

An arsehole.

Anyway, the reason I'm telling you this story is because I just saw him. Saw him about an hour ago. He was lying at the side of the road in his suit, just outside a J.D. Wetherspoon's. He looked like he's been dead for weeks.

If he was anybody else, back when he collapsed or whatever happened, I'm sure somebody would have asked him if he was all right. Somebody would have known that not everybody lying on the ground is drunk, they're perhaps diabetic or having a fit. And now, now that he is quite obviously dead, if it was anybody else, I would have phoned the council. I would have phoned the council or the police and made sure the guy's family was notified. If there wasn't any family, I would have organised the thing myself. I'd like to think so, anyway. I would have made sure the guy got a decent funeral, I'd have perhaps raised some money to give him a decent send-off, I would have tried to get some people to come along. I'd probably visit his grave now and then to place some flowers there and give the gravestone a wipe.

But this guy? The father of the bride?

No.

He's an arsehole.

A known arsehole.

Chris sat in work on the computer, looking at a spreadsheet. He couldn't really get into it. It was his birthday.

He glanced at today's date at the bottom right of the screen. There it was. It usually gave him a wee rush of excitement seeing that date, like when he saw it last week on a carton of milk; Oh look, that's my birthday, he thought. He had no big cause to get excited, it wasn't like he had anything exciting planned, he was just going to come into work as usual. But, you know, you do expect things to be a wee bit different on your birthday, maybe a bit of extra friendliness from people, a bit of attention, that type of thing. But as the office worked away quietly behind him, it didn't look like that was going to happen. He thought that was a shame. Or maybe he was just being a big baby.

It's just, well, Chris could do with something like that, the friendliness, the attention. In here, specifically. Here in the office. People were a bit cold towards him, he felt. It's not that they disliked him, they didn't want him out, they didn't put in complaints or anything, nothing like that. They just weren't as chatty with him as they were six months ago, when he started. It wasn't that the honeymoon period of being the new guy was over; there was another guy who had started around the same time and they were still chatty with him. The thing was, Chris wasn't very good at conversations. He never quite picked up the skill of knowing what to say and when, or knowing when to stop. He'd go off on tangents. He'd go quiet when asked a question, not realising a question had been asked. He'd say things that nobody would understand, like when he dropped in a reference to an obscure
Star Trek
character during a conversation his colleagues were having about a rug one of them bought in Ikea. And for that reason, people tended to give him a swerve.

So it was no wonder that they didn't know, or care, that today was his—

‘Happy birthday to yooooou, happy birthday to yooooou!'

Chris turned around, wondering for a second whose birthday it was, surely this wasn't for him. But there they were, half the office walking over to his desk with a cake, with the other half looking over from their seats and smiling. Chris was smiling as well. He tried keeping tight-lipped to hide just how much it meant to him, but eventually he broke into a cheeser from ear to ear.

‘It's very chocolatey, I hope you like chocolate,' said Janette the receptionist. Look at that. Janette barely spoke two words to Chris throughout the entire week, except to say good morning if she happened to be looking his way when he walked through the door. And here she was looking at him, carrying his birthday cake, having a laugh, like they were pals. Oh, he wasn't that sad, he knew they weren't really pals, but it was a nice feeling to go along with. It made a change.

‘I do,' said Chris.

His colleagues laughed. All eyes were on Chris, and he liked it. For this brief moment, he was the most popular person in the company. It was just what he was after. A brief moment of experiencing the life of a well-liked person, a person that people like to be around. A brief moment of receiving unconditional good will. Just look at how they laughed when he said ‘I do', despite it not being funny. What was so funny about that? Nothing. Yet they laughed. It reminded him of when he'd just started, when people would smile at him and give him their time, before they decided he wasn't worth it.

‘Orange as well,' said Janette. ‘It's sort of chocolate orange.'